Thursday, June 28, 2012

James Cameron Roundtable #5: The Abyss b/w Reach

Loren Greenblatt: We just saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Underwater Edition.

MO: That’s a fairly accurate description of The Abyss. Cameron’s films all have
Spielberg influences, but this is his most overtly Spielbergy movie.

LG: Spielbergy?

MO: Spielbergy is a word. I’m coining it here.

LG: Alright, Joss Whedon. Let’s talk a little bit about
where this film came from: this was a passion project for Cameron. He came up
with a short story when he was about 17, kept it on his mind, and after the
success of Aliens he finally had a
chance to make it. It combines his love of extraterrestrial life and, most of
all, his love of the ocean. The man is an aquaphile.

MO: Insert Simpsons-Troy
McClure joke here.

LG: He loves the ocean, so this is the perfect film for him.
It takes place in an underwater drilling rig run by blue collar oil workers
(trope!), and there’s a crashed nuclear submarine (trope!), and the oil workers
are hired for salvage and to find survivors.

MO: They’re led by Virgil “Bud” Brigman, played by Ed Harris
in a great performance as the blue collar hero, and his wife, chief engineer
Lindsay, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, who’s most famous for playing
Tony Montana’s sister in Scarface and
for her Oscar-nominated role in The Color
of Money as Tom Cruise’s girlfriend.

LG: Sadly, I don't think she did much after this.

MO: It’s too bad, she’s very good in everything I’ve seen
her in, but like a number of Hollywood actresses she disappeared as she got
older.

LG: And she has a Sigourney Weaver-esque edge to her, but
not quite as tough.

MO: It’s more overtly cerebral, but she’s also filled with a
great deal of humanity and compassion, and there’s a Spielbergian desire to
understand our so-called boogeymen in her character. The aliens that they find
underwater, which could be scary, aren’t frightening to her. She wants to
understand what they are, how they work, and why they’re there. She recognizes
a shared intellectual curiosity they have.

LG: I think the key line is “you have to look at the world
with the right kind of eyes”.

MO: It’s a corny line, but it does encapsulate the heart of
the film very well.

LG: I’m not quite sure if they’re aliens, though. They call
them NTIs, or non-terrestrial intelligence.

MO: But we get the idea that they’re not from around here.
They could be aliens. I thought they were.

LG: I took it that they were an intelligent race that lived
underwater, which is entirely possible.

MO: It is, and it’s left open, which is something I really
like about this film.

LG: We see them throughout the film, but we don’t really get
to them until the end, and Cameron has a lot to get through before then.
There’s a number of Navy SEALS who accompany the oil workers underwater, led by
Michae Biehn as Lt. Coffey.

MO: He’s a gung-ho jarhead who, like a number of military
men in Cameron’s films, doesn’t have much interest in understanding his foes.
He lacks the empathy of the scientists.

LG: And you know he’s the bad guy because he has a moustache
and he wears black.

MO: He’s also suffering from high-pressure nervous syndrome,
where he’s underwater and he starts to shake and lose his grip on reality
underwater and grows more paranoid.

LG: In Futurama terms,
he’s got ocean madness.

MO: It doesn’t help that we’re at the tail end of the Cold
War and he’s already paranoid about Russians. It’s 1989, so this is right
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a few years before the Soviet Union
collapsed.

LG: We watched the Special Edition, which is very important
to mention, because they’re very different films. In this version, there’s a
Cuban Missile Crisis type situation going on. The aliens are underwater, the
military is suspicious, so Michael Biehn gets the ominous order to “go to phase
2”, which is never good in a movie. Biehn arms a nuclear warhead from the
submarine and brings it back to the base. At the same time, there’s a hurricane
that causes an accident, and it traps the rig underwater and cuts them off from
the surface.

MO: It’s one of the many Cameron films that establishes a
very tight timetable for the characters to work in.

LG: Like in Aliens, which
also had them cut off from their ship.

MO: Now Cameron has to establish a lot of characters and
make us like them, since we’re going to spend three hours with them. By and
large, they’re pretty good. There’s a rough blue collar character named Catfish
who’s a lot of fun, there’s an African-American woman named One Night who’s
great. Really the only one who doesn’t work is Hippy, the rat guy.

LG: His gimmick is that he has a rat as a pet. I found him,
at a screenwriting level, too gimmicky. A lot of these characters have their
gimmicks: One Night is a black country-music girl, and that’s pretty good.
There’s a fun scene where they sing a country song, “Willing” by Linda
Ronstadt, as they travel to the sub, and that’s pretty great. Hippy is too
self-conscious though.

MO: It might have worked with a more talented actor, but Tod
Graff really overplays the twitchiness. The only other thing I know he ever did
was direct this proto-Glee movie
called Camp, which, other than an
early performance from Anna Kendrick, is completely intolerable.

LG: Oh, yeah, he’s a conspiracy theorist and all that. It’s
too much. Now, this is a very important film stylistically for Cameron. Apart
from having his pet themes, it’s the first of his films with a really
hard-edged blue look that he’s known for.

MO: Well, Aliens has
a lot of it, but not to this extent. We joked about a part where a frustrated
Ed Harris throws his wedding ring into the toilet, changes his mind, and has to
delve into the blue goop that’s in the toilet to find it. Throughout the rest
of his movie, his hand is still blue. We noticed that forty minutes from the
end his hand was still blue. It’s funny.

LG: His hands are blue, his balls are blue, everything’s
blue in this movie.

MO: Both above and underwater.

LG: It’s also his first PG-13 film, which he acquits himself
well with. There’s a couple of fight scenes between Michael Biehn and Ed
Harris, and they’re all great. He manages to keep them fairly brutal with the
sound design and lighting, despite the lesser rating. There’s a scene where
there’s a swinging light between them that helps keep the scene dynamic when it
could have been really standard. Cameron’s really good at taking little scenes
and finding a way to pump them up.

MO: The lead-up to that scene is ever better, when Ed Harris
has to swim his way into where Michael Biehn is because the doors are locked
and Biehn is arming a warhead, and he comes into the pool area (and this is
below-freezing water, mind you), and he has to come up to Biehn without making
any noise. He’s dripping wet around a pool of water, so this is very difficult.

LG: I love that he messes it up, too. He gets there, and he
has a pipe, and all he has to do is swing, but he goes for the man’s gun. He’s
not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, and that’s mentioned throughout.

MO: They manage to do it without making it out-of-character
or comically stupid. It’s the kind of mistake we all might make. It’s not
painfully boneheaded.

LG: He’s not suddenly dumb for the convenience of the
screenplay. What really drives the film is the tension between Harris and
Mastrontonio, his estranged wife. She oversees the process, but she’s also in
the process of divorcing him. It’s a very standard movie thing, Twister had the same plot going on.

MO: Was probably influenced by it, honestly.

LG: But the caliber of the performances and direction makes
it work well enough. We should talk about the set-pieces. You called the crane
sequence one of his best set-pieces, so you should talk about it.

MO: There’s an incredible set-piece near the end of the
first act. The storm is brewing, it pushes the crane on the oil rig, which is
connected to the oxygen, heat, and power for the underwater part of the rig. It
collapses during the storm and falls underwater, narrowly misses them, and
narrowly misses landing in a the gigantic underwater trench, which would pull
them under because they’re attached by a cable. And then it slips into the
trench, and everything goes to hell. There are leaks in the ship, several crew
members drown in some absolutely horrifying scenes, and there’s a race to
survive as several compartments fill with water.

LG: It’s a harrowing scene, and what Cameron does well is
establish a mood of desperation. There’s a scene much later in the film where
one character almost drowns, and they try to revive her. Cameron milks it for a
long time…

MO: It’s like the Toy
Story 3 ending, where they milk it as long as possible to give the sense
that the worst will happen.

LG: And the film starts off a little slow but gets better
and better as it goes along.

MO: It’s one of his most deliberately paced films, without a
doubt.

LG: It’s not like Aliens
or Terminator 2, where every
scene has eight things going on, and everything moves the plot forward. It takes
its time, and that’s just fine.

MO: There’s a slow-burning claustrophobic feel.

LG: There was a point in the film where I stopped thinking
about the special effects, because it all looked real. In fact, there are
submarine chases here, and they weren’t done with models. These are real
submarines. They built the world’s biggest water tank and filmed it there, and
if you’re into spectacle, it’s really cool.

MO: Better than even Aliens,
we get a great sense of how everything works: what this gadget does, what
this doohickey does, what the machines can’t do. Cameron is so tapped into
technology that we get a sense he’s not fudging any details. There’s too much
specificity.

LG: At the end of the film, we have one of the greatest
sequences Cameron has ever done where Bud has to use liquid oxygen (which is a
real thing for really deep dives). Ed Harris has to dive into the trench to
disarm a nuclear bomb, and his descent is a tense sequence that Hitchcock would
be proud of.

MO: Earlier scenes are like a warm-up for the drowning
scenes in Titanic, but this thing is
like a free-floating space bit, but underwater, and if something goes wrong,
you’re done. He can’t speak because of the liquid oxygen, he can only
communicate with a keyboard, and the pressure is so intense that it causes him
to lose it. What’s great is that when he finally reaches the bottom and has to
disarm the warhead, he’s told that he has to cut the blue wire with the white
stripe, not the black wire with the yellow
stripe.

LG: But his only flare is green, and the wires look
identical by that light. By the way, it’s the only green light in his films I
can think of, it struck me as a del Toro light…although he wasn’t active at the
time.

MO: Well, del Toro has cited Cameron as an influence.

LG: I think any action director would be wise to cite
Cameron: del Toro, Nolan, Jackson…

MO: While the film is slower than his other films, his big
set-pieces have that feeling of kinetecism to them: the oil-rig collapse, the
fight, the submarine chase. But that last one is just a slow, dragged out bit
of tension.

LG: We should talk a bit about how the film works tonally.
It’s a little bit all over the place. There’s this bit where you see these
aliens every once in a while. They’re these big, shiny, bioluminescent sea
creatures, and they’re absolutely gorgeous…

MO: Early Industrial Light and Magic work that’s a precursor
to Terminator 2.

LG: Including a water-tentacle that’s a prototype for the
liquid metal android. But we see these aliens, and Alan Silvestri’s score is
doing this very John Williams-esque thing that makes it all feel like it’s a
bit like Close Encounters, what with
the wonder and awe.

MO: It’s warm and fuzzy.

LG: But we get some other dark, desperate scenes for the
nuclear war bits, and we feel like we’re being tugged back and forth between
two extremes. It’s not bad, but it’s sometimes a little unbalanced. It’s a
total 180.

MO: He handles both tones well, but the transitions are a
little shaky.

LG: But it’s still a relentlessly fascinating film, even if
it isn’t an edge-of-your-seat classic.

MO: It’s also the first film of his with a large amount of
clunker lines. “Do you hear me, Roger Ram Jet?”

LG: Oh, yeah...

MO: What the hell was that?

LG: Lindsay calls Biehn that for some reason, I don’t know
why…

MO: Well she’s making fun of him…

LG: But it’s a “yippie-kay-yay Mr. Falcon” moment. It is his first PG-13 film, maybe he tried
to censor himself.

MO: It might be. And there’s some great funny lines: “Raise
your hands if you think that was a Russian water-tentacle”, because they keep
mocking Biehn for thinking the Russians are responsible for the alien activity.

LG: And Ed Harris keeps repeating “keep your pantyhose on”…

MO: That one didn’t work for me.

LG: Eh, I think it works OK, but it’s overused.

MO: And there’s a corny line when Harris goes down.
Mastrontonio tells this story to keep him lucid…

LG: It’s a good story. You get the feeling it might have
actually happened to Cameron.

MO: It’s a good story that was unfortunately cut from the
theatrical version, although it absolutely should be there, but one line,
“there are two candles in the dark”, that’s corny, but Mastontonio sells it.

LG: Also the juxtaposition of him going down into the
darkness is a wonderful mental image with it.

MO: If Cameron didn’t direct it and Mastontonio didn’t act
it as well, it’d thud. But it works overall…what did you think of Ed Harris
screaming “NOOOOOOO!” into the camera?

LG: Uh…

MO: It’s fun…

LG: It’s like Avatar, where
the tree is destroyed, Cameron milks the tragedy a little too much. A little in
Titanic as well. He does this, it’s
one of his more emotional movies ,and he gets carried away sometimes.

MO: In some way, though, it’s his most ambitious movie. The
way he’s juxtaposing earnest messages with bigger than life emotion and
technology and action sequences and his love for underwater stuff...it’s not an
ordinary blockbuster. By all accounts, this should not have been made in
Hollywood. I really appreciate it.

LG: You needed Cameron to make something successful first
before he could get away with this. We’ve got Christopher Nolan for that now,
though much as I love Nolan I don’t think his films are as dense as Cameron’s.

MO: I think he’ll get there, but yes.

LG: More stylistic tropes: we’ve got more slow-motion…

MO: And his love of using smoke and fire in some sequences.
He makes great use of bright lights and shadows. He frames a lot of these alien
creatures like he did with the alien queen or terminator, where they overwhelm
the frame, only now it’s filled with wonder and awe rather than terror.

LG: It’s a benevolent creature. It’s the darker version of Close Encounters…though not as good.

MO: Well how could it be. Like a lot of Spielberg and
Cameron films, there’s a sense of untrustworthy authority in Biehn’s character.
Biehn really nails this. I think it’s his best performance. They do a good job
of making his villain’s motivations clearer than, say, Stephen Lang’s character
in Avatar.

LG: They’re both a little cartoonishly evil, but there’s a
line that almost justifies his behavior. When the water tentacle sees the
nuclear warhead, he notes that “it went straight for the warhead, and they
think it’s cute!” Obviously he’s wrong, but you can understand his argument.

MO: It’s handled pretty well.

LG: Funny you mention Spielberg, since he worked with
Michael Crichton on Jurassic Park. If
Cameron were ever to adapt a book, I think it would be a Crichton-esque thing. I’m
surprised he and Crichton never did anything together, because Crichton
actually wrote a book called Sphere that’s
similar to this from what I remember. There’s a deep underwater dive as a
spaceship crashes in the ocean. It was adapted into a very little-loved movie
in the 90s. But Cameron and Crichton have a shared love of technology and
adventure. When you read a Crichton book, it’s like watching a Cameron movie
where everything feels well-researched and thought out.

MO: It’s like with Cameron, even if it’s gobbledygook and
mumbo jumbo, it’s really intricate and detailed.

LG: It’s real mumbo
jumbo.

MO: Some other influences: Cameron has that same
Kubrick/Ridley Scott interest in what makes us human. In this case it’s the
ability to feel empathy and form emotional connections with each other.

LG: Which Cameron doesn’t handle as well at the end.

MO: But the relationship between Harris and Mastrontonio is
great before that.

LG: Now, SPOILER ALERT, at the end it looks like Ed Harris
is going to drown, and these underwater creatures rescue him.

MO: In the theatrical version, they rescue him, basically
say “hi”, and note the final words he gave to his wife before it looked like he
was going to die (“I love you”, basically). Then they bring them back together.
It’s a bit anticlimactic, but it works better than what we get in the Special
Edition. All of the other additions are great, but the ending in this
version…well…it hits with a thud.

LG: In the extended version…it’s very sci-fi cliché…

MO: It’s like The Day the Earth Stood Still, but terrible.

LG: They’ve been watching us for years, it’s in our nature
to destroy ourselves, and they’re going to use they’re ability to control water
to send thousand-foot tidal waves to destroy humanity. They stop them at the
edge. Cameron’s solution to the Cold War is another Cold War. Humans will
behave because they’re scared the aliens will destroy them. We’re asked to
believe that the creatures are benevolent, and then they almost commit
genocide.

MO: For the rest of the movie, there’s an idea of tolerance,
shared intellectual curiosity, and understanding our ostensible “boogeymen”.
It’s very Close Encounters/E.T., and
then they turn into monsters…and it’s handled in the preachiest way possible.

LG: There’s actually a line that says “I guess we have some
growing up to do”. And then an oil rig guy turns to the military man and says
“guess you’re out of a job now”.

MO: Oh, it’s bad. It’s painful.

LG: It’s one of those things where, as a critic, you really
like the film, and then you feel your letter grade dropping.

MO: I feel this is one of the most flawed great (or
near-great) movies ever made. It’s stunningly ambitious, you’ll never see
anything quite like it again, it’s intensely personal, and it shows Cameron’s
interest in putting social awareness in his films in a more pronounced way. He
does that best when he filters it through a genre movie like the Terminator movies, and worse when it’s
over like the ending of The Abyss and
all of Avatar, where it’s painfully
earnest and simplistic. Terminator 2 straddles
the line of being preachy and being OK, but it does it better than this.

LG: War is bad, people!

MO: It works better here than in Avatar because the characters are better fleshed-out, but the
ending hits with a real thud.

LG: Now I’d recommend this. You’ll never see another movie
like this with real submarine chases again. It’s too easy to do it with CGI,
and it wasn’t practical for Cameron to do it at all. People almost died,
actually.

MO: Ed Harris almost drowned, he broke down sobbing at one
point, Mastontonio walked off the set in anger after Cameron told the cast to
relieve themselves in their wetsuits rather than change in order to save time.
The great Orson Scott Card of Ender’s
Game fame did the novelization, and while he said he worked with Cameron
just fine, the way he treated the cast was inexcusable. This was, except maybe
for Titanic, his most arduous shoot.

LG: When you almost kill your star, that’s not good.

MO: And his producer at the time, Gale Anne Hurd, who had
worked with him on The Terminator,
Aliens, and was also married to him at the time, but this film ended their
marriage and their professional relationship. This is where we first hear how
much of a tyrant he was on set, more than his “I disagreed with the crew” bits
on Aliens.

LG: He is known as a demanding, strict man. That’s not
entirely bad, you should be dedicated to your craft. I don’t think you reach
this level without being dedicated. But some people get here without this cost.

MO: He based Mastrontonio character off of Hurd, and yet it
ended their marriage.

LG: Worth noting that the heroes are about to get divorced
in the film.

LG: I recommend this film: it’s three hours long, and it’s
flawed, but it’s worth it. I give it a B+.

MO: That’s what I give it as well. The theatrical would get
a B. It’s not bad, but the relationships aren’t as fleshed out, and while the
ending isn’t a total thud, it’s anticlimactic. The Special Edition, while
flawed, is so fascinating and ambitious that I highly recommend it.

LG: Visual spectacle more than anything else, good as the
character relationships are. No one does it like Cameron, and we’ll never see
anything like this again.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Max’s Reach Grade: 59 (B-)

Loren’s Reach Grade: B-

LG: Now between Aliens and
The Abyss, James Cameron directed a
little music video…

MO: REACH!

LG: Yes, it’s a music video for a song called “Reach” by
Martini Ranch, which was a musical collaboration between Bill Paxton and some
other guy (Andrew Todd Rosenthal, but neither of us has ever heard of him).

MO: Yeah, it’s Bill Paxton’s band. That’s the only reason
Cameron directed this thing, I think. He agreed to do it so long as he had no
contact with the record label. It has a budget of $90,000, which sounds like a
sizable budget for an 8-minute video.

MO: I don’t think anyone saw this. I had never heard of it
before Loren brought it up. We found it on DailyMotion, and I had never heard
of the band or anything about this. The design of the video is very
interesting: Paxton is clad in biker gear that looks like a cross between the
way he looked in Near Dark and the
way Arnold looked in Terminator 2.

LG: There’s a lot of leather in this film. There’s a brothel
with women wearing leather…which is an odd thing. He’s usually a feminist
director, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect this from him, this
objectification.

MO: Well, he might just be portraying a time period or
something. It seems like an oppressive environment. Plus, the hero is a woman.
In fact…

LG: The hero is Cameron’s future-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who
is gorgeous.

MO: Who’s still gorgeous. She’s sixty years old and you’d
never guess it. She looks forty.

LG: But in this she’s much younger.

MO: But aside from that, she’s a great filmmaker. The year
before Reach, she made Near Dark, which is the quintessential
vampire movie as far as I’m concerned. She made Point Break, the goofy/wonderful action movie with Keanu Reeves and
Patrick Swayze…

LG: Which was produced by James Cameron…

MO: She made Strange
Days, a sci-fi film we both like a lot…

LG: Which was written by James Cameron, though we’re not
going to cover it here.

MO: And most recently she became the first woman to win the
Oscar for Best Director when she won for The
Hurt Locker. It’s funny cause she actually beat her now ex-husband Cameron
when he was nominated for Avatar. She
also has a new film this year, Zero Dark
Thirty, the “killing Osama bin Laden” movie.

LG: Perfect timing on that: bin Laden was killed days before
she announced she was making it, so it got plenty of momentum.

MO: But as for Reach…

LG: Long intro, Paxton comes up to the town and terrorizes
it, and a gang of women trying to catch him (led by Bigelow) that come into
town wearing Sergio Leone dusters. And as if there was any doubt that Leone
influenced this, the song liberally samples The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’s score.

MO: Plus there’s images that look like they’re straight out
of A Fistful of Dollars, what with
the people building coffins. The film’s look is very distinctive and
interesting. I wish it were just an 8-minute short, because the song is not
very good.

LG: Whoever Bill Paxton’s bandmate is, I’m sure he’s behind
a fast-food counter telling everyone “I once had a band with Bill Paxton, and
we had a video directed by James Cameron”.

MO: And everyone responds: “…sure….”

LG: That may not be true, he might be doing something else
very successfully.

MO: But we can’t remember the song ten minutes after the
fact, other than them yelling “REACH!”